I have a 29g aquarium that has been set up for about 3-4 months now. This is my first time seriously trying to grow plants. The water params are...

Nitrate 15-30ppm
Nitrite & Ammonia 0
Phosphorus 0.1 ppm
pH 7.0
KH 5

I dose with Flourish and Flourish Phosphorus twice a week according to directions. The fish supply the nitrates and I change the water 25% once a week to keep them below 30ppm. There is also pressurized CO2 with a controller.

The aquarium gets between 12 and 14 hours of 65 watt pc light per day.

I have an amazon sword plant that is growing HUGE, anubias nana, microswords in the front that are slowly filling in to make a lawn, and a few species of stem plants that I rescued from a ball of sludge dredged up from a LFS plant tank.

The plants went in first. Then fish were slowly added. The water never got cloudy when it cycled. Then the brown algae hit. Then fine short green hairy algae. Then thread algae. Then green spot algae along with black beard algae. The brown algae ran its course after a few weeks. So did the thread algae. But what remains is a persistent colony of the remaining types.

I put in a pair of ottos and there are two species of snails that hitchiked in on my plants. They don't seem to be doing much to hold back the algae growth. I scrub the glass once a week but it grows back in about two weeks if I don't scrub.

I am not favoring a blackout because the result seems like it would only be temporary.

I have read articles and posts and see many other options. I don't have too much time to spend lately and I would like to know what are some of the easiest things I can do first to get the best results.

First of all you need to lower your Nitrates, cut back on lighting to 10 hours a day and increase water changes. According to your KH/PH readings you are injecting 15ppm of C02, you need to up this to between 20-30ppm. Also keeping a 10:1 ratio of N:P will help. Otto's will not touch hair or BBA algae, Amanos shrimp for hair algae & SAE's for BBA. You also need to add some Micro nutrients. Not exactly in this order.

First of all I would remove as much algae by hand as possible, then cut off badly affective leaves. You may have to do a bleach/water dip for the plants. Clean the glass and and other decor of the algae. Then do a 50% water change, afterwards start 30-35% water changes weekly.

For the Hair algae I would not dose ferts for 2 weeks, cutback the lighting to 10 hours and get your nitrate and phosphate inbalance.

Once you start dosing ferts again then start adding Micro nutrients according to the bottle labels directions for the BBA and get 2 SAE's.

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